Ezra Pound – { feuilleton }

Vortographs

Reading this article by Richard Shone about the Vorticists, I was struck by passing mention of Alvin Langdon Coburn’s “Vortographs”. Coburn was an American photographer whose most commonly reproduced works are his portraits, some of which included leading members of the Vorticist circle such as Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, and a number of pictorial early works. The Vortographs date from 1917, and were an attempt to produce photographs that fragmented the world in a manner similar to Vorticist painting, a process that necessitated the creation of a kaleidoscope-like “Vortoscope”. Seventeen of the results may be seen at the George Eastman collection. After a century of pictorial excess these don’t look so radical today but they’re some of the earliest examples of deliberately abstract photography, and to the world of 1917 they would have been even more shocking than the paintings they were hung beside.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Blast
• Wyndham Lewis: Portraits
• The Door in the Wall

Passage 13

Ed Jansen writes again with news that no. 13 of his Dutch-language web magazine Passage is now online:

Number 13 of Passage contains stories about the Buddha Machine, a strange little box that emits music, then there is ‘Escape from the dollhouse?’, which is about the art of Hans Bellmer, surreal and strangely erotic, ‘The Skeleton that Climbed in Through the Window’ tells the equally strange and sad story of the life of Unica Zürn, companion of Bellmer and ‘Nomads of the Timestream’ is of course about the work of Michael Moorcock. This collection begins and ends with two sides of a story about the version of the visit of Odysseus to the Underworld, by Ezra Pound.

The customary eclectic mix, in other words. The Buddha Machine section is a nice overview of recent ambient music machines. I love the ad art for Zhang Jian’s Short-Wave of Bengal Bay.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Passage 12
• Gristleism
• Passage 11
• Buddha Machine Wall
• Passage 10
• God in the machines
• Layering Buddha by Robert Henke

Blast

Both issues of Wyndham Lewis’s avant garde art and literature journal can be found in a collection of similar publications from the Modernist years at Brown University here and here. I’ve always liked the bold graphics of Lewis and his fellow Vorticists, and BLAST 2, “the War Number”, is especially good in that regard. The MJP site reminds us that BLAST is still under copyright control outside the US and is also available in facsimile editions from Gingko Press.

BLAST was the quintessential modernist little magazine. Founded by Wyndham Lewis, with the assistance of Ezra Pound, it ran for just two issues, published in 1914 and 1915. The First World War killed it, along with some of its key contributors. Its purpose was to promote a new movement in literature and visual art, christened Vorticism by Pound and Lewis. Unlike its immediate predecessors and rivals, Vorticism was English, rather than French or Italian, but its dogmas emerged from Imagism in literature and Cubism plus Futurism in visual art.

The original BLAST was published by Aubrey Beardsley’s first publisher, John Lane, and it’s fascinating to see Lane advertising back issues of The Yellow Book in pages which include Lewis’s anti-Victorian polemic. Meanwhile I’m still waiting for copies of the Art Nouveau journal Ver Sacrum to turn up somewhere. If anyone runs across quality scans, please leave a comment.

Via Things Magazine.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Wyndham Lewis: Portraits

Picasso-esque

Jessica Helfand at Design Observer draws attention to Mr Picassohead, a site which allows you to create your own Picasso-style portraits. The interface doesn’t have as much choice of elements as the Simpsonizer did but messing around with it this afternoon yielded a passable rendering of David Britton’s Lord Horror.

This idling reminded me that I’ve yet to finish reworking the Lord Horror series Reverbstorm which I’ve been engaged with on and off for the past year. The handful of people actually waiting for this magnum opus should know that other work and new Savoy projects keep intervening at the moment. Anyone who saw the original comics will be aware that pastiching Picasso was a consistent theme from issue five onwards. For those who haven’t seen the comics (and few people have…) I’ve posted a couple of the original Picasso-esque Horrors below, beginning with a more representational view of his Lordship for those unfamiliar with the appearance of the man.

A 1997 portrait which owes much to the style of Burne Hogarth‘s later Tarzan illustrations.

Continue reading “Picasso-esque”